From the people at Chukar Cherries comes their Cherry Blossom Trio, which is a collection of three boxes of milk and white chocolate covered cherries. The boxes are nice and colorful, headed off with a logo of nothing other than a chukar bird (which, though apparently in the pheasant family, somehow reminds me of an eagle). Chukar Cherries is located in the Pacific Northwest, where they sell a variety of dried berries, nuts and fruits, and some chocolate products like these. The thing I like is their belief in drying berries without using artificial preservatives.

Now, in approaching this box, I think it’s something you can happily pick up on a trip to Washington, either to have while traveling or to bring back home. The overall look of it has the right balance between a local and established product.

The cherries themselves are not a variety of both milk chocolates and white chocolates as I at first expected, but rather have a layer of each. The pink color comes from the outer layer of white chocolate; the milk chocolate layer is of about the same thickness.

The ratio between these two and the cherry in the middle is also about right. I’m enjoying that the inherent tartness in the cherries is not glossed over; instead, it’s embraced and enfolded by the chocolate, which has enough of its own sweetness to share. But I do have to pick on the white chocolate a little. You have to work to make me enjoy white chocolate, and the one here just felt like a placeholder, adding no real flavor of its own to the experience. I’m not opposed to the milk and white layering – I just think that this is an area for improvement.

After all, it is the cherries themselves that started it all – since they work well, I trust that the chocolate will follow suit, too, and in the meantime, I’ll just go ahead and open the next box.